


Back To The Worms Where You Belong

by lushthemagicdragon



Category: Critical Role
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Be warned ye who enter here, Canonical Character Death, Competency, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Memory Loss, Not Really Character Death, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Stitches, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, Whump, this fic is intense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-20
Updated: 2019-02-20
Packaged: 2019-11-01 10:36:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,597
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17865650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lushthemagicdragon/pseuds/lushthemagicdragon
Summary: By the time that Mollymauk pushed his way through the packed dirt of his frigid grave, he had died four times. On the last, Caduceus Clay was there to clean him up and get him on his feet. For the time being, anyway.





	Back To The Worms Where You Belong

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was written for a Christmas Exchange. It is intensely dark, enter with caution, heed the tags. Enjoy.

By the time that Mollymauk pushed his way through the packed dirt of his frigid grave, he had died four times. The first time, so far away from here in a world of colour and fancy, his will to live and the drive of whatever force had breathed a second chance into his body had him clawing through the fresh, warm dirt until he was gasping for breathe with no words or name to claim as his own. The soil had not been packed well by cat or man. It was soft, and while brown flecks had remained embedded in his teeth and nails for weeks, the effort had not broken skin.

The second and third times Molly woke up in his grave, the earth was frozen from the northern winter chill. It had frozen so solidly that it did not fill his mouth when he gasped for air and tried to cry out. He couldn’t make it out.

The fourth time that Molly woke from the dead the winter snow had melted, sinking into the soil that had trapped him months earlier. He woke up feeling damp, with a trickle of water against his ears. The nails that he could not remember scratching and breaking against the frozen dirt pulled and tugged him out into the open air. He wheezed and he wept, scrambling away from the near frozen tomb. He couldn't remember what had scared him so severely, but the crunch of ice under now bruised knees, palms, elbows and bloodied fingers sent his stomach turning and his throat retching up nothing but newly thawed stomach acid in lingering panic.

Mollymauk came back with no memory each time. The first he had been left with nothing. The second and third found him trapped. The fourth came with panic, a pounding headache, and then a soft voice nearby.

“I was wondering when you would come out of there. It’s been a few months, but your friends really hoped that you would.”

  


 

“Here you go, this should warm you up.” The tea cup in Molly’s hands was the first truly warm sensation that he could recall. It seeped in through the crevices of his fingerprints like the coat wrapped around his body couldn’t. The tall man that found him, that had hefted him into a cart and took Molly to the warmth of his home had wrapped the thing around Molly’s body like it mattered. He said something about that coat being Molly’s.  It rang no bells in Molly’s ears, sounded no alarm. All that it was was not warm enough.

“My names Caduceus. Caduceus Clay.  Do you remember your name?”

Silence. Molly opened his mouth. Closed it. There was nothing. The emptiness was dizzying.

“Well that’s no good.”

The scraping of a chair on the ground broke the silence and, finally sitting, Caduceus nodded, and he smiled. He spoke slowly, like the words themselves took time to carry.

“You’ve got some friends out there who think you’re dead, but after what they told me...Well, I’m not really a fan of anyone raising from the dead like you did but I’ll admit, you had me curious, and I needed to make sure. They said your name’s Molly. Can you say Molly for me?”

He opened his mouth again. He tried to speak, and all that passed through his lips was a weak rasp. _Molly_.  The sound of it couldn’t find his tongue. The back of his eyes prickled, and he just couldn’t grasp it.

“That’s alright.  We’ll get you there. Drink that tea, it’ll help.”

Caduceus smiled with such gentle surety that Molly believed him, and he drank.

 

Grief is a funny thing. Sometimes, it creeps up without anyone knowing it’s there at all. It can come out screaming, or sink you deep into a void where nothing moves for miles and miles. Caduceus had seen grief in its many forms. He had seen it in the living, the dying, and the dead. The dead, he’s found, grieve in stunned silence more often than not. They grieve viscerally, because they are in all senses of the word no longer attached. For his whole life Caduceus had worked with death and its griefs, and for five days Caduceus Clay worked on Molly. For five days he sat with him, talked with a practiced softness about nothing, with all the care he had worked his whole life to perfect. They picked leaves and vegetables from the garden, and Molly was alright. They dried out mushrooms and kept the dead company at their graves, and Molly was alright. Molly was alive, slowly finding words on his tongue, remembered nothing, but he was alright.

He was alright until he wasn’t, but that’s always the way with grief.

Caduceus stitched up the wounds on his wrists with a steady hand, the ones that had made the knife in Molly’s hand glow and caused him to call out in surprise.  The wounds whose whole purpose of being was to bleed, and whose blood alerted Caduceus to their presence in the night. The stitches were perfect, masterfully done Molly imagined, with no frame of reference beyond how even they look in his skin.  Big, gentle hands wiped the blood away with a warm cloth, and that prickle in the back of his eyes came again at the sensation. His eyes were wet but there were no tears. No pain, no numbness, only the warmth of Caduceus’ hand that seemed that it could never reach his insides at that magnitude.

 _You shouldn’t be alive and you know it._ a voice had spoken into Molly’s ear off the wing of some black-feathered bird passing ahead in the dead of night. It rang through straight to his core where the emptiness sat. No memories, no life, no connection to the names he was supposed to know, the people he was supposed to care for. Covered in scars he couldn’t recall or identify, what would one more set do?

“I don’t want this.” Molly’s voice didn’t shake. It darted out past his tongue like a scared snake, and receded again.

“I know.”

“Why won’t you just let me die?”

Caduceus sighed, took a beat before sitting down on his haunches and looked at Molly from his position of care on the floor.

“I’ve been in this house my whole life, taking care of those graves and the people who belong to them. All of my family have gone looking for some way to save this place, but I stayed here, because the Wildmother needed me to. I’ve been looking for a sign from her for what to do next, for something important that I need to do. If you excuse what uh, might sound a little crass...Well, I think you might be it.”

“I don’t care that you think I’m important. I shouldn’t be alive.”

The void pricked at the back of Molly’s eyes again, and it echoed inside his stomach. His voice wavered like it could crack. There was nothing. He was grasping at straws to find any reason at all to exist and all he that he found is nothing.

“No, you shouldn’t be.”

“What?”

“Death should be a natural thing. Everything dies eventually, and they go back to the earth where they came from. Death is...random, and a lot of the time it comes when maybe it shouldn’t, but it comes anyway. Now I don’t know how you died the first time, or if it even was the first time. This time you died badly, but you still died. You should have stayed dead, and I think that because you didn’t, something else must have taken your place. That...That's not a good thing at all. You won’t die if you kill yourself like this. You’ll only make all of whatever this is worse, and who knows what will happen to you if you keep coming back from the dead. _This_ , how you are right now, is unnatural. Going back into the dirt right now, the way you are, is even worse. Stay alive. Something is taking your place, surely.”

Grief, Caduceus has found over the years, takes many forms. It shows it’s soft underbelly and pretends that it wants the gentle caress of comfort.  It curls into a ball with it’s spikes and points pointing outwards, threatening, wanting no touch at all, as if getting on the defensive means that all it has to do is wait until the danger has passed. More often than not though, he’s found that a gentle caress, or simply walking away from the defensive barbs doesn’t help. It isn’t, at the end, what grief always needs. Sometimes it needs honesty, a grounding in reality that feels safe. Grief is terribly afraid of what comes next, if anything at all. The truth hurts enough to uncurl the defensive barbs and expose the stomach to the care it needs, and Mollymauk felt alone when he began to cry.  He clutched at his own wrists like he could tear the good stitching out, and the words he couldn’t find didn’t come. The hollowness bled and filled, remained hollow, bled and filled again to the brim and drained its excess.

“Hey, come here now,” Comforting words came with the strong embrace of Caduceus’ arms as he pulled Mollymauk into his chest, caressed his hair, let that very alive dead thing empty his fear into Caduceus’ chest. “You’re going to be fine. I’ve got you. Well get you back in the ground later but right now, you get to live.”


End file.
